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POLITICO 44

Reasons vary as to why these committees persist. But for many of the more prominent ones, they’re deadbeats — owing their continued existence to unpaid debts, some of which are so old that they’re difficult to confirm.

Take the Clinton/Gore ’96 General Committee, which enjoyed its heyday at a time when the Macarena topped the pop charts.

Federal records show that it owes $174,260 to the City of Seattle for “event site rental” in addition to smaller debts for consulting fees, polling services and travel. The committee lists the debts as “disputed” in Federal Election Commission filings.

“Staff here at that time in those various departments do not remember any unpaid bills of this magnitude,” City of Seattle spokeswoman Katherine Schubert-Knapp said. “It is now, and would have been then as well, policy and practice for a city department with such a large debt to send it to collections and no one has memory of that happening. In other words, we’ve come at this every way we could think of and came up with nothing.”

Tom Ryan, an attorney at the office listed as the Clinton/Gore ’96 General Committee’s official contact, referred calls to former committee counsel Lyn Utrecht, of law firm Utrecht & Phillips, who did not return messages.

The FEC may terminate a committee but typically does so only when a committee falls below minimum reporting thresholds and falls idle for numerous reporting cycles, commission spokeswoman Julia Queen said. Legally, a federal political committee cannot shut itself down if it still owes money to creditors, she noted.

Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who ran in 2000, fits that description. More than a decade after losing the GOP nomination to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, he’s still struggling to clear more than $108,000 in debt from his books, payable primarily for marketing services.

That hasn’t stopped Bauer from later leading a separate federal political action committee, dubbed the Campaign for Working Families.

Bauer spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick said her boss is aware of the presidential campaign debt and is working to pay them off. “It’s an ongoing process, and I suspect it’s a similar thing for other candidates in this situation,” she said.

It is for the Rev. Al Sharpton, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2004 and today hosts a radio and an MSNBC talk show when not engaging in activism through his National Action Network.

Most recent campaign finance filings indicate Sharpton’s presidential committee still owes $925,713 — second only to 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, whose debt exceeds $2.6 million, although much of that is in the form of loans to himself.